Crisis, make the heart grow bolder

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s nationwide addresses during the lockdown are reminiscent of his barnstorming election campaign speeches of the past that have so successfully embedded his image as the Supreme Leader across the country. They are also similar to the public interventions in the past few months made by US President Donald Trump, who has gone to lengths to project himself as a superman leading America to a pinnacle of glory.

The two leaders are, however, operating in completely different political scenarios. Obsessed by elections just a few months away, Trump seems to not care much about combating the pandemic, or the economic grief ahead. By pointedly not wearing a mask and encouraging anti-lockdown protesters, Trump wants to convince his core constituency that he remains in total control against all odds so that it rallies around him on polling day.

There is no such electoral compulsion for Modi, and he has been more circumspect than his American buddy. After all, he has already won his second term by bagging a larger majority than in the previous one. He can certainly afford to eschew political grandstanding and take the public into confidence about the trials ahead, expressing determination to overcome them but without making false promises of a bright future around the corner.

Yet the PM has seemed, on occasion, to needlessly play to the gallery as if in campaign mode. Rituals to appreciate the good and brave work being done by the country’s health workers against Covid-19 can seem at odds with Indian Air Force jets performing fly pasts and showering petals at a time when people on the roads continue to suffer, and virus-related fatalities rise. At a time when the entire business sector, from small shopkeepers to big corporate houses, remains paralysed, for him to speak about India emerging from the pandemic as a self-reliant industrial behemoth leading the world can sound jarring to some ears.

The announced Rs 20 lakh crore as a fiscal stimulus dodges the fact that the government may neither have the capacity nor the will to put out the entire sum. As finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman herself has revealed in daily doses, the package, despite its best intentions, is severely handicapped by the lack of actual allocation of funds from the state exchequer to restart MSMEs crippled by lockdown, or the huge logistic and legacy problem of reaching free foodgrains to the starving poor who are yet to receive cash transfers. Modi could do well to borrow a leaf out of the book of his predecessor, PV Narasimha Rao, who took some hard, innovative decisions with less bluster when faced with an unprecedented crisis three decades ago. Rao turned economic policy upside down within the month of July 1991 ending India’s licence permit raj, slashing fiscal deficit and tariffs, and devaluing the rupee.

Like Rao, Modi could also try and win over his opponents using the plea of a national emergency. Rao overcame a minority government and a hostile Opposition to get political backing for his sweeping new economic policy. Modi, who has no national competitor, is in a far better position to enlist the Opposition and its chief ministers to join the collaborative effort required to meet the challenges ahead, even if it means ceding some political space for his own party for some time. The PM could do well to look beyond optics at this time.

This piece appeared as an editorial opinion in the print edition of The Economic Times.